One of my pet gripes about x86 systems is having to interact with the
clumsy menu-oriented BIOS. Coming from the SPARC world, I always enjoyed
the clean command-line interface of OBP. Judging from similar comments on
e.g. comp.unix.solaris and private discussions, it seems I'm not alone in
this respect.
I even asked Andy von Bechtolsheim after his presentation of the
(then-upcoming) Galaxy systems during the Solaris 10 Platinum Beta final
meeting about this, and while it seemed to be considered a desirable
feature, there were also resource problems to make this happen.
I can fully understand that moving Solaris/x86 to be OBP-only is a
non-starter if the O/S is to run on non-Sun systems, and maintaining both
BIOS and OBP support at the same time (to give interested customers the
choice) poses resource problems, but with OpenSolaris, Sun is not the only
player in this field. Given that the upcoming PowerPC port uses OBP and is
working towards using GRUB as its bootloader, I'd like to assess the
community interest in such a project. I'm certainly not the one to lead
such an effort, since my knowledge of the x86 architecture is minimal and I
know OBP only on the user side, but maybe there are others that would like
to drive such an effort along.
I thing there are several resources available to support this:
* As mentioned, Solaris/PowerPC is going in this direction and already
working on using GRUB with OBP.
* There has been some talk to switch SPARC to NewBoot as well, among others
to support ZFS boot. I've no idea of the current status of this effort,
but work done there might help as well.
* Last but not least there are both the OpenBIOS project
http://www.openbios.info/
and the commercial implementation by FirmWorks
http://www.firmworks.com/
I've not idea if EFI might be a viable alternative: I haven't ever seen it
and certainly don't suggest to resurrect the ill-fated Solaris/IA64 port :-)
Maybe the use of EFI by the Intel Macs might push it instead of OBP,
although I'd very much prefer to see the same interface across all
architectures supported by Solaris.
Comments?
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
